Run 38715611090 still stopped at the profile screen: averaging 4x4 blocks and taking a 5x5-block median leaves large bold text in the estimate (the title read as a dark background) and lets the white labels lift a grey disabled button over the threshold. A map coarse enough for titles would swallow 55-pixel buttons, so each word's background is now the median of the rows 2 to 4 pixels above and below its box, read from the 8-bit grayscale screenshot, which also feeds both OCR passes. Checked offline on the screenshots and TSVs of runs 38712854507 and 38714550750: the first screen, the profile screen with its title and grey button, and the branch chat list with the typed text and the directory row all read correctly.
In run 38714550750 the background map judged the white title area dark and the grey "Create profile" button light, so both were dropped, and onboarding stopped at the profile screen on both apps. ImageMagick's Q16 build writes PGM samples as 16 bits unless told -depth 8, while the reader takes one byte per pixel. The reader now also refuses a map without 8-bit samples.
Run 38712854507 showed that the released app (v7.1.0-beta.6) has no search field after onboarding: with no chats its left pane is empty and the centre shows "Talk to someone", while the branch shows the search bar in that state. The chat list is now recognised by "Talk to someone", which both show; the release job stops there (onboarding mode), and the branch run again requires the "Search in Directory" row after typing.
Run 38712854507 got through onboarding on both apps, but on the branch app the typed "ci smoke" was lost: the dark-text pass read it as "ci smokel" with confidence 6, below the cutoff, while the light-text pass read noise ("OKC!") at the same place, and its "i)" split "Search in Directory". The light pass reads the gaps between dark letters as text, and the dark pass reads noise inside the coloured buttons, so neither confidence nor a pass order decides well. A median of the downscaled screenshot gives the background luminance; a word counts only from the dark pass on light backgrounds and from the light pass on darker ones, with no confidence cutoff. Phrases are now built from neighbouring words, so a stray word elsewhere on the same row no longer splits one ("Be" and "free" were).
Run 38712060819 showed that one image for both polarities smears page text: the morphological open treats the white gaps between dark letters as light text. Dark text now comes from the local threshold of run 38707461053, which read the grey and dark onboarding text; light text, such as labels on coloured buttons, from the difference from an open, which leaves no ring at the button edge. The words of both passes are merged by position, keeping the more confident reading.
In run 38711351160 the normalised image had no rings and showed the button labels, grey and dark text all dark on white, but the fixed 80% threshold turned every pixel with over 20% contrast black, so letters merged into blobs ("Be free" read as "Be tires"). With the background now uniformly white, tesseract's own threshold separates the text, so the image goes to it in grayscale.
Run 38707461053 read the grey onboarding text after the local threshold, but not the white labels on the blue buttons: in the negative image the threshold drew a thick ring around each button, and tesseract output nothing inside it. The text image is now the difference of the screenshot from its morphological close and open, so dark and light text both become dark on white and step edges between regions cancel; one tesseract pass instead of two. Each shot keeps that image and tesseract's TSV in UI_OUT/ocr.
In run 38702315040 the app started under Xvfb and showed onboarding, but tesseract's single global threshold, pulled down by the black screen outside the window and the illustration, lost the grey text and the white labels on the blue buttons, so "Create your profile" was never found. A local adaptive threshold (-lat) on the enlarged grayscale image and on its negative turns both into dark text on white. Each shot now also keeps the two images OCR read, in UI_OUT/ocr.
The branch's Kotlin does not compile yet (DirectorySearch.kt and DirectorySearchView.kt import chat.simplex.res.MR instead of chat.simplex.res.*), so the app job stops before the UI steps. A new release job downloads the desktop .deb of the branch's latest release tag for the runner's Ubuntu and runs the same smoke test on it, which exercises Xvfb, openbox, xdotool and the OCR helper independently of the branch build. The smoke test now checks that the typed text appears in the search field and reports whether the Search in Directory row is shown, since releases before directory search don't have it. This run also checks that the core library cache is hit.
First iteration on f/ci-desktop: the core job builds libsimplex.so with scripts/desktop/build-lib-linux.sh on ubuntu-24.04 (GHC 9.6.3, direct-sqlcipher +openssl, no VLC) and caches it by source hash, with the cabal store cached separately. The app job builds :desktop:createDistributable with Corretto 17 and the repo's assets, runs :common:desktopTest, then starts the app under Xvfb and openbox with software rendering and drives onboarding to the chat list and typing in the search field with the ui helper (xdotool input, tesseract OCR to find text), saving numbered screenshots, the text read from them and a step log as artifacts.
spacedandy-agents-simplex